Pursuing fiscal credibility, performing fiscal discipline: epistemic politics and status seeking in Italy and Spain’s Eurozone accession

There is a prolific literature on the politics of austerity, highlighting how its confidence effects arise from fiscal retrenchment embodying and signalling a credible commitment to markets’ interests. However, I argue that this implicitly performative account of fiscal credibility is too functionalist, underplaying how states continually negotiate it with different audiences. To overcome these issues, this article develops an alternative theorisation of (fiscal) credibility as a perlocutionary performative, meaning it is dependent on felicitous conditions to be brought about. Channelling a ‘practice-based constructivist’ framework through an ‘epistemic politics’ and ‘status seeking’ lens, I use archival and biographical research to study Italy and Spain’s Eurozone accession during the 1990s. My argument is that the success of their austerity programmes, and therefore of their accession strategies, depended on a series of cognitive and strategic dynamics beyond fiscal retrenchment – mainly, based on the epistemic politics of multilateral surveillance, national status claims to fiscal credibility, and the social construction of ‘credibility’ under a broad set of fiscal and non-fiscal parameters. As such, this article contributes to recent constructivist research on the practical life of ideas and on epistemic politics, showing the dynamics of construction, performance, and contestation surrounding austerity and fiscal credibility.